


Tale as old as time

by JauntyHako



Series: Post Season 5 AU [3]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen, Ripping shreds into the time-canon-continuum, Teyla suggesting to John he should try writing fanfiction, all collections of literary works feature corny vampire romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2016-07-05
Packaged: 2018-07-21 14:58:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7391854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JauntyHako/pseuds/JauntyHako
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The expedition uncovers what appears to be the Lantean's library. Soon everyone is hooked on the stories it contains.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tale as old as time

**Author's Note:**

> So this has a lot of set-up for future plots in it, by which I mean I have to explain somehow why the wraith are nice now but still not everyone's going home and calling it a day. 
> 
> You need to have tension and if that means raising the dead, then so be it.

At the beginning of the expedition to Atlantis every member was allowed to bring one gigabyte of personal data stored on Atlantis' mainframe, as well as anything they could fit in their backpacks. With so many different people and cultures coming together the resulting collection turned out to be as interesting as it was diverse. And although certain titles repeated themselves – they had three Independence Days – it still took a while to watch it all, especially with the Daedalus bringing in a few new titles on request with every delivery. When John was done with the last movie, he turned to the books, which were a little less accessible due to their lack of English voice-overs.

He would have still been years from finishing those as well, though, if it hadn't been for the accident.

 

When asked about it, he'd tell people his team was ambushed by wraith and they had to clear a path back to the gate, in the course of which he was hit by weapons fire. In his official report, where he had to tell the truth, stood that he had slipped on the muddy ground and shot himself in the leg. The bullet pierced bone and even with advanced Ancient medical technology he was still bedridden for a week and another four weeks allowed to move around only on crutches.

It provided him a lot of time for some quiet reading. So much in fact that by the end of his second week out of commission, with another three to go, he had read everything he could get his hands on, even the Spanish Harry Potter that Sergeant Mendoza loaned him. He climbed the walls for lack of anything to do. In his desperation he even caught up with the last few months of paperwork. So when Rodney called him from the northwestern pier with some exciting news, he hobbled there as fast as he could.

 

 

"Took your sweet time." Rodney said upon his arrival. John had to resist the urge to hit him with one of his crutches.

"Very funny, Rodney. What've you got?"

Rodney's eyes lit up like a young child's on a pony farm. He gestured John to come closer and opened the display section. A list of files began scrolling over it.

"The Ancient's library." he said with a satisfaction as if he just announced having found the blueprints for ZPMs. "I _think_ this is all fiction. I mean, they're not exactly using Dewey Decimal here, so a lot of it is just guessing, but yeah, everything points to fiction. Right here." He opened one of the files which he must have accessed before because translation was already complete. "This one's about zombies. Not really zombies, more like a virus of sorts that settles in an Ancient's brain and control their actions after they die. The backstory is a bit fuzzy, I think there's a prequel, haven't found it yet, but it's about this crew of people who go out on the fringes of the galaxy to fight these bugs. It's written from the perspective of their captain, Lady Snow, and boy she really is something. There's this one scene with that guy who's been feeding them false information and at that point they don't know yet that-"

"Okay, okay, don't spoil me." John said, interested despite himself. He'd always had a thing for horror and that book sounded right up his alley. "Can we transfer this to an e-reader?"

Rodney looked at him with an astonishment as if he hadn't thought John knew what an e-reader was, much less care to use one.

"Uh, yes. Yes, we can. In fact, I already downloaded some of the files to my own device, it should just be a matter of drag and drop."

John spent that afternoon going through several pages of the library's index, choosing more or less at random. The book about the zombies he copied first, but then also several volumes of what apparently was some kind of historical paranormal romance between an Ancient and a member of some kind of servant species. He'd deny on the threat of decapitation that he'd read romance, but if pressed he could always just say he'd hoped for some Alien like body horror.

Thusly equipped with more than enough reading material to last him the month he made his way back up into the mess hall. He was going stir-crazy in his own quarters and like this he could listen to the people around him while he read.

 

 

Rodney had been right. Lady Snow, the main character of the book, was something. Ruthlessly calculating every move, seemingly not caring if her crew lived or died against a fight she couldn't win. She kept her more introspective moments to herself, in the few hours between action. He was reminded of their own struggle against the wraith and wondered if the author of the book had tried to deal with their experiences by fictionalising them.

 

_We approach the fringes of Eschalian space. Every one of my crew is focused on the task ahead, yet I feel their fear as my own and can not fault them. Though we are experienced, victorious through many battles, our desperation grows stronger with every ally we lose. I fear the day might come where our species stands alone against the tide and I do not know if we can hold it back._

_For now I must not dwell on my own worries. There is a battle ahead and no time to second-guess ourselves._

 

"Good read?"

John looked up to find Woolsey standing by his table, holding a tray. He gestured for him to sit and put his reader aside.

"Very good. The Ancients really had a knack for literature."

"It seems they had a knack for everything."

John huffed and grinned, slightly moving his leg into a more comfortable position.

"Seems that way. Anything except zombie novels crop up yet?"

"You can say that. Our sociology and linguistics department are practically falling over themselves making new discoveries about Ancient culture. There is a lot of non-fiction in there as well, diaries and that sort of thing, but we don't really know yet what system the Ancients used to separate the actual historical facts from the zombie novels."

"Maybe they didn't." John suggested, thinking about the down to earth, almost realistic way the novel was written. "Maybe they didn't really care what was what if they went looking for a good book."

Woolsey shrugged.

"Maybe. It would sure help our historians if they had. Well, just wanted to give you an update. I'm sure you can keep yourself busy."

"I sure can." John said, waving his reader and immediately diving back in, once Woolsey left the table.

 

_As we dock on the space station I can not help but feel a shudder creeping up my spine. Just weeks ago this station was a thriving city, where merchants and explorers from all corners of the galaxy met and exchanged ideas. I am hesitant to set one more foot in this mass grave and the crew feels my reluctance. In times like these I wish I had a consort, someone to remind me what I am fighting for. For now, my own grit must suffice and for this day it does. We will find the corpses of friends, flinging themselves at us with wild abandon, and must kill without hesitation. These are the people for whom we came too late and thus before the day is done, we will have killed them twice._

 

 

John read until late in the night, disoriented at times at a point of view over ten thousand years in the past, but riveted by the plot nonetheless. On that space station Lady Snow lost two men and described the pain of seeing their dead bodies so visceral, John had to take a step back and breathe. Even when he returned to the book, the faces of the men Lady Snow lost always wore the faces of Sumner, Ford, Weir and so many others.

But as he kept reading he wondered about a prequel, too. There was a lot of information crucial to the plot that he was assumed to know and didn't. For example the exact nature of the Eschalians was never explained, only that they used to be people and now weren't anymore. There was also hints to certain people being able to sap the virus' strength somehow by placing their hands on the sick person's chest. Maybe they were the kind of ancients who had healing powers, like Teer's little sister in that time bubble.

The worst thing however, was the ending. John read it twice and still was left floundering. The novel, written as a series of log entries, ended abruptly just after what he thought was the epilogue, where Lady Snow's crew eradicated the last nests of Eschalian husks and were hopeful for the future.

An appendix simply stated that Lady Snow became a traitor fighting against Atlantis and her people and was to be taken dead or alive. Damn the Ancients for not properly filing their book series. He was almost sure the appendix was a teaser for the sequel but the library didn't spit out any more information on Lady Snow and her crew, except for a few references to a military project called "The Snow Gambit" which he thought might have been named after the fictional hero. Rodney did say the database had taken some minor damage across the last ten thousand years, several of which had spent in active war against the wraith. He would just have to live with the fact of ending a damn good novel on a cliffhanger. Somehow that annoyed him more than his fractured leg did.

 

He was still annoyed the next morning when he met up with Teyla and Todd to watch them spar. Teyla insisted that even when he couldn't partake himself, he could still learn from their tactics. For once, he was inclined to agree. At the very least it would distract him from the book.

Every time Teyla and Todd fought John was reminded of that trace of wraith DNA in Teyla and the influence it had on her. It was as if she could read Todd's mind, anticipating his actions and foiling his reactions. To her he was as predictable as a roly-poly. But Todd was more experienced and moved Teyla into situations where even if she did know what he planned she couldn't stop him. Together they flowed around and into each other like ink in water, a fight with no holds barred, because each knew exactly what the other could take. It made John feel somewhat better about always losing to her in sparring sessions. If even a wraith with ten thousand years of combat experience was barely her equal, John's own performance wasn't too shabby.

"Oh! She got you good there." he said, cheering on either side depending on who was winning. Todd snarled with his teeth bared, each breath a menacing growl. It was a wraith's version of trashtalk and admittedly it worked better than "Your momma's so fat, a wraith tried to feed on her and it died of a heart-attack."

They fought with more stamina than John had at the best of times but eventually even they called it quits with Todd winning by an inch. They sat down to John's left and right, Teyla drinking deeply from her bottle, Todd regaining his breath. The fight had distracted him from the book's horrible ending but now he was right back at it, having half a mind to talk to Woolsey about letting them check out some of the Ancient outposts in hopes of finding the sequel. Or at least the prequel. Or anything more about Snow. He felt like that one time in College when they watched the Shining and the power went out just after the axe scene and by a string of coincidences he hadn't managed to watch the rest of the movie until he got stationed at McMurdo. He hoped it wouldn't take that long again to get some kind of closure.

"You seem lost in thought. Is this about the story you and Rodney were talking about?" Teyla asked.

John made a sound to acknowledge that he'd been caught.

"It ends on a cliffhanger and there's nothing more in the database. It just stops."

Todd listened but didn't enter into the conversation. He rarely did, which some people took to meaning he didn't care for them, when the opposite was true. He just wasn't very chatty, unless he could argue about science. Then it was a task to get him to shut up.

"Has it occurred to you that the author might have died during the war and was unable to finish their work?"

It hadn't but now that Teyla said it, it made sense. The last change to the file was made just decades before the Ancients fled to earth. Whoever wrote the book could have been killed in the conflict with the wraith. John must have looked positively downtrodden, because Teyla squeezed his shoulders.

"Maybe you can continue the story yourself? My people know many stories partially forgotten over the centuries and we fill the gaps when we tell them."

"Not much of a storyteller." John said. "But thanks. I think I'm just gonna have to live with it."

 

Instead of dwelling any more on the zombie story, he started reading the romance novels, which at least were guaranteed to be complete, as he had all five of the promised five volumes. In a way, the contents were more disturbing than Snow and the zombies.

The first clue that John might be reading about something not entirely unfamiliar came in the prologue, if by clue one meant that it hit him over the head so hard it left him dazed.

 

_This is a recounting of my life among our newly created children race, who are so much like us and yet equally so little. They have had sentience for barely five hundred years and already their culture is far apart from our own. It makes me proud to see them grow in this way, that despite the purpose we made them for they can still write the most haunting poetry and appreciate the aesthetics of the galaxy around us with a passion that astounds me. Many of my kin see them as nothing but tools and look with concern at their growing society that is governed by its own laws. But I say we made them to be independent, to be different than us, so the plague would not affect them. In time it may well be that we have all succumbed to this new illness threatening our path to ascension and they are the only ones to remember us. It is hard to believe that it was only my grandfather who pioneered their creation, an entire species so full of potential made from a few of our own stem cells and a few of the Iratus bug's._

 

The reader clattered to the ground, startling several people in the mess hall. He bent down with some difficulty to pick it up, staring into nothing. It was hard to know what in those novels was fiction and what historical background information. Was this an alternate universe imagined by the author, in which the wraith had been created to be the Ancient's allies, or did they really come from an Ancient lab, just like the replicators had?

He'd ask Rodney later. For now he'd keep reading, hopefully finding some answers of his own.

He hadn't gotten a few lines into it when Todd approached, probably looking for someone to spend some quality silence with. John didn't think he'd have a problem with him reading while they did not talk to each other, but he put the novel away just in case.

"Hey there." he greeted him and Todd nodded in return. The reader seemed to capture his interest and suddenly John knew exactly where to get his answers.

"Actually it's good you showed up. There's a few questions I wanted to ask you."

Todd huffed. John used to think it meant impatience when it was quite the opposite. This was Todd's way of saying "I'm listening and won't interrupt you by telling you I'm listening."

"I'm reading this book about the wraith. You mind telling me what whoever wrote it made up and what's fact?"

Another huff, followed by a shrug. 'I'll help if I can and as long as it keeps me interested but I might leave in the middle of your sentence if I get bored.' was the rough translation for that one.

Without further ado John picked up the book again and read aloud:

 

" _The first time I set foot on a Hive ship I was amazed at the display of colours that presented itself to me. Wraith naturally prefer a sort of twilight, are in fact hurt by our blinding lights on the base, which we make sure to dim when they visit us. As such I expected my surroundings to be drab and devoid of colour but as their commander led me down the winding hallways I was engulfed in rows of purple and blue taffetta, reflecting the light in the most magical way. The wraith on this ship were clad in similar colours, the clevermen in purple, the blades in blue. We on Atlantis have always adhered to a more minimalist style, a preference clearly not shared by our children. On top of their colourful robes they wear jewelry of the finest make, adorning their hair with silver and gold pins, their feeding hand especially decked with accessories, from simple rings connected with fragile chains, to strong bracelets with glass stones in the style of our power modules, but blue and purple like the sky after a sunset."_

 

There was a weird expression on Todd's face as he stopped, something even John, who knew him better than anyone, couldn't interpret. Then the wraith said, his voice barely above a whisper: "We had to make many sacrifices to ensure our survival."

"So it's real?" John asked before he picked up on the grief accompanying Todd's words. He cleared his throat, sank back into the chair. His leg ached in second-hand embarrassment of his owner's tactlessness. Todd didn't take it personally.

"It is real, John Sheppard. The wraith as you know them were not always as culturally starved as they are now. Once we had traditions and art. The war took a lot from the Lanteans but it took much from us, too." He paused, then nodded his head towards the book. "Keep reading?"

John swallowed and picked up where he left off.

 

_"Their ship is called_ First drop of rain after a sweltering summer day _which to us sounds unduly long. But we must remember that the wraith communicate telepathically more than verbal and what we hear as something akin to a poem is to them merely an attempt to translate an impression in the mind, a mixture of sight, sound, smell and emotion all conveyed in the fraction of a second. Compared to their telepathy our verbal language must seem clunky at best. Even so the commander of the_ First drop, _as I will call her in this writing, continues to be patient with me. He must be, for he is a healer by nature and the_ First Drop _a relief vessel sent into places where people suffer from the Eschalian plague."_

 

John stopped again, to the questioning sounds of Todd, who had slumped in his chair a little as he listened.   
"It's nothing." he answered the nonverbal question. "Just that this Eschalian plague seems to be a running theme in their fiction."

Todd grunted again, a bit more impatient this time and John continued.

 

_"It is my firm belief that much of the colourful fabrics and objects directly serve the purpose of setting their patients at ease. Our advanced technology allows us to be largely unconcerned with the hygiene issues imposed by this type of form over function, but even so the Commander admits they spend a fair amount of time keeping the place clean. The people from the capital have little contact with the wraith and I feel it is their loss. Even after the first day I was richer in years and experience than in several decades before. Common superstition regards the wraith as plague bringers, for their intimate connection to its victims. As so often, the narrative confuses cause and effect, in this case to the harm of the wraith and all who avoid them for unfounded fear._

_I did not get to meet the queen of the Hive on that day, nor on any day of the first month. She, at present and by tradition the only female wraith on the ship, the one who leads all the rest is the most busy. Smaller carrier ships bring in refugees day and night and the first time I saw her in person I was walking among the sick, separated from them by an environmental suit. She was kneeling by an old man wheezing for air as the tumours overgrew his lungs. She placed her hand on his chest, the slight jingle of her jewelry like bells announcing the salvation of all, and took the excess life force from his body until he breathed easier. Then to the next she went and to the next, growing stronger when our own healers would get exhausted. That is, my readers will know, what we made them for, but I think we have failed to take into account the enormous emotional toll we burden them with. When at last she was so close I could see the individual inscriptions on her rings, I also saw in her eyes a profound sorrow. Of the seventy afflicted we were brought that day, thirteen died, all of them in excruciating pain and, what is perhaps for worse for a species as social as the wraith, alone. When they awake again, just minutes after their souls go on to the afterlife, the wraith have already decompressed the room in which they died and left them to the emptiness of space. It seems they cannot bring themselves to seep the unnatural force from these awakened dead and watch them perish twice over. I would have thought that faced with such horrors as the only purpose of their existence the wraith would grow cold and callous but the opposite seems to be true. They seek comfort in each other and us as well. During my journey on the_ First Drop _I made many friends over our shared grief."_

 

Both Todd and John needed some time to digest this.

"So, you think wraith and Ancients used to be best buddies?" John asked, working through it by talking about it.

"This was before even my time." Todd said and that in itself was a revelation. With his age it was natural to assume there was nothing he didn't remember. To think of a time so far back that even Todd hadn't lived to see it, the idea of ancients and wraith working together was no longer that much of a reach.

They parted ways for the day, John promising to meet back up again tomorrow at the same time and continue where they left of. He didn't know exactly what made this a shared venture, but he wasn't about to complain. The only thing he hated about reading was how lonely it could get.

 

John and Todd met up almost every day to read a few pages together. At first they sat in the mess hall, undisturbed by the people coming and going but eventually they relocated to John's quarters. The synopsis had promised to show the romantic entanglement between an Ancient and a wraith but by the time they got to those parts John had forgotten all about it. When he read the first lines of mushy romance he was very glad to have some privacy. Todd seemed both embarrassed and intrigued by the development, much like John himself.

 

_"We had worked together for months now_." John read, studiously avoiding eye contact with Todd who sat slouched in one of the arm chairs, coat hung over the back and apparently fascinated by the breeze outside moving his curtains. _"And as much as the prospect scared me, I would lie to say I had not seen this coming. Hush was my tether in this madness and his name, entrusted to me only now and replaced with another in the published version of this diary, became my sole prayer. He was a healer, by profession as well as nature, and on that night he professed to me he felt the bond between us growing beyond that of his brothers, I felt as safe as the plague afflicted must under his hands, promising them if not a new life, then at least a painless end. In this instance, with the colours and gems playing tricks on my mind, I was ready to give myself over to him, body and all, if he would demand it. I was prepared to give him all I had, my life force even, though not being taken ill it would mean my death. I did not care and said as much and Hush took me in his arms and swore to never take advantage of my trust. And thus I knew it was well placed and in the hours that followed we shared each other in equal measures."_

 

John cleared his throat, as did Todd. Each stared at their own hands, overly aware of every rustle of clothes, everything that could be interpreted as any reaction at all to what they just read. This was worse than watching a movie with your parents and having to sit through the sex scene. Despite their shared awkwardness John was almost entirely certain he was freaking out for different reasons than Todd. With so few women among the wraith, homosexuality probably wasn't an issue to them. To John, it very much was and while was wasn't against that sort of thing, spending his entire youth with his father's world views surrounding him, it also wasn't something he could get over easily.

There had to be something he could say to make the awkward silence go away. At this rate he'd die from mortification before getting a chance to get back in the field again.

"Huh. Sure had an active imagination, didn't they?" John said and wanted to slap himself. Good job, John, he thought, way to go. Todd made a noise that John thought meant "I don't know what to say but instead of blurting out the first thing that comes to mind like _some_ people, I choose to say nothing and save my dignity."

He probably would have dug himself in deeper but Rodney came to his rescue. His radio crackled.

"Sheppard. I need you down in the library. I … found something."

John jumped at the chance to get away from this situation and so did Todd. Together they descended down the stairs, much more at ease with each other now that there wasn't any fictional romance looming over them. Some day they would have to talk about why it had made them so uncomfortable. John for his part hoped he'd be six feet under when that day came.

 

Rodney already waited for him when they arrived. He barely acknowledged Todd's presence and immediately launched himself into an explanation of the exact process that led him to his discovery, including several short anecdotes of his day that didn't technically have anything to do with the topic at hand but in Rodney's corkscrew mind were intricately related.

"… and her niece apparently writes something called fanfiction, which reminds me of that expanded universe theory I had about the interconnectivity between the universes of Star Trek and Star Wars, but anyway she says those fanfiction can have multiple genres and sort of stand on multiple shelves because it's all just data. Now when we tried to figure out the Ancient's classification system we had analogue libraries in mind, where you have to decide, what shelf do you want to put it on. As it turns out that assumption was completely false. So then Radek and I dug a little deeper and we found a sort of tagging system, that-"  
"Rodney."

"It's not fiction." Rodney said, thusly summing up in three words what could have become a ten page essay on Ancient literary classification systems. John blinked.

"What are you talking about? Of course it's fiction. There's zombies and, and …" And wraith and humans 'sharing each other', which he didn't say because he did not want Rodney to know he read that sort of thing, especially not with Todd. "And stuff." He finished lamely.

"But it is. Look, you can check for yourself if you want, but I'm telling you. All those books we've been downloading, they're real diaries and logs. At some point in Ancient history all of this really happened."

"I'm sorry, but this is a little hard to believe …"

"That's not all."  
"Oh, it isn't? Well do share with the class."

"This Eschalian plague? I think it's still around."

 

John lay awake long that night, the new information spinning in his head. Rodney had theorised from what he read that a few of the Hives had foreseen they would stop being useful to the Ancients if the plague was really gone and they'd also lose their unlimited food supply. According to him they went off into dark space and could conceivably still be around, if they managed to keep the Ancients who accompanied them alive over generations. The idea that some wraith older than Todd sat somewhere at the edge of the Pegasus galaxy with a deadly plague on their hands was just a little bit disconcerting. John had ended that discussion by saying that even if those ancient wraith were still alive, if they hadn't returned so far, they probably never would.

There was nothing to worry about, even if reading the rest of the diaries with Todd had just become ten times more awkward with the revelation of all of it being real. Maybe he could persuade Todd to skip the romance scenes. With the faint greenish blush tinging Todd's cheeks after today he didn't think he'd have much trouble.

With that thought he finally fell asleep, secure in the knowledge that nothing could hurt their friendship, not even awkward tales of interspecies romance.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I swear this is gonna get shippy at some point. Also there'll be more focus on action and plot and Todd next time.


End file.
